


Antonia Maria Fucking Stark

by worddancer



Series: Avenge Revenge [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Character Study, Daddy Issues, Everything is better when its gayer, F/F, F/M, Mentions of sexual violence, Merchant of Death Tony Stark, Other, PTSD, Rule 63, Stacy Rodgers, Swearing, Toni Stark - Freeform, Tony Feels, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, Trauma, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, i have feelings about this, implied sexual violence, lots of swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-22
Updated: 2018-09-22
Packaged: 2019-07-15 12:49:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16063505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/worddancer/pseuds/worddancer
Summary: Merchant of Death they called her and she didn’t give a flying fuck. She was Howard Starks daughter and she was going to build the biggest boom in the world. Until everyone forgot that Howard Stark once made Ms. America in a machine. Until she was the only thing Howard Stark made. (Ms. America made herself- Stacy made herself but Toni didn’t know that yet.)





	Antonia Maria Fucking Stark

**Author's Note:**

> So I showed a friend my Avenge Revenge story and he wanted more about all of the characters. So my brain was like bitch you don't need sleep. 
> 
> This has bits and pieces from Avenge Revenge verbatim in it FYI. I might add more for the other characters as I figure them out more.

When Toni Stark was 7 years old she was shipped off to boarding school with nothing but her bags and a hug from the butler who should have been her father. Maria was off at some charity gala, or rehab, or something. Howard was three floors down, second door on the left, in the lab that she was never allowed in. He was building more weapons. If he couldn’t find his damn Ms. America, his perfect weapon, he was going to build something more deadly. Something more beautiful.

  
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and to Starks the bigger the boom the more beautiful the destruction is.

  
Toni built her first weapon of mass destruction when she was sixteen years old. She’d designed it as a way to mass deliver vaccines to malaria-stricken areas. Drones filled with aresoled vaccines that could be released over large areas of land. Her father took her design and twisted it, he filled it with poison, with gas, with things that exploded, and he sold it to the highest ally bidder. He called it beautiful

  
Howard only ever looked at her when her hands created destruction. Like a well trained attack dog she always rolled over for his fucking praise. She saw the bombs he built, the explosions he made, the scotch he drank and swore she would do it all better.

She built her first robot at age 5 and painted it red.

  
Red was a color that got noticed. Red was the color of her mother's favorite lipstick. Red was one of the colors on Ms. America’s shield that her daddy hung in the living room of the mansion. Back when Howard Stark was still Daddy.

  
Howard Stark was too busy looking for a ghost to notice the little robot that followed his daughter at her feet. Howard never bothered to look at little Toni unless it was to tell stories of the woman he made who became a war hero. He never bothered to look unless he could take what ever she brought him and make it explode.

  
“God she could fight, she’d hit you too if she had a reason. She was a hero. Damn SSR boys couldn’t see it until she made them. She was my greatest creation.” Howard would say after his third drink.

  
When Toni was little she loved hearing about Ms. America, if daddy made one hero maybe he could make another one in her.

  
By the time she was 13 the stories were another reminder on how she wasn’t worth a damn unless she could explode too.

  
Her first paten was a little robot that rolled around a house and made sure the air was clean. She made it in the seventies when smoking filled every restaurant and home. She was 12 years old. Howard put a bomb in that one too. Now it could roll into small spaces and blow enemies of America up.

  
Toni saw his praise and she wanted more.

  
That’s always been her problem- no matter what she has she always wants more. She’s stubborn, petty, bitchy, selfish and every other word anyone has ever thrown at her. She’ll look you in the eye and smile as she devours you whole. There’s no chance of salvation when you run to damnation with open arms and begging pleas on your lips.

  
Antonia Maria Fucking Stark very quickly learned to love the beauty of things going up in flames.

  
Her father created a weapon in Ms. America and one in his daughter. For the man who loved destruction it was amazing he could barely be bothered to look at his greatest explosion.

  
Howard Stark may have been a bastard but fuck that man knew how to blow up the world.

  
Howard swore he could turn anything into a weapon. Maria was too busy to see he was turning their daughter into one before their eyes.

  
Toni knew exactly how fucked up it was that she only cared about who her weapons killed when they were aimed at her. Toni thought maybe she cared before- once upon a time- but enough coke, sex and booze can get rid of any feeling if you do it enough. And she knew how to do enough of it. Moving through the world with her brain going as fast as it did, making the connections it did sometimes she just wanted everything to be numb for ten fucking minutes.

  
She lost so many pieces of herself in that cave she didn’t know where to pick them up but she could make sure her weapons don’t kill anymore. She built a better suit and one by one blew up every damn missile she ever built. She goes into clean energy. She goes into saving the world instead of killing it.

  
Any more killing with her name is going to be done by her hands alone. She’s done with hiding behind her company. She knows the blood on her hands and damnit she’s going to be the only one to shed it. She built a suit out of scraps and spare parts and kept herself alive long enough to blow up every damn person who thought they could make her afraid.

  
Her legacy. Hers alone.

  
Antonia Stark lost her virginity blackout drunk at a frat party when she was fifteen and desperate to prove that she was more than Howard Stark’s daughter. A shiny toy on the shelf to be taken down in front of company and asked to perform tricks.

  
Antonia made the headlines of the papers for the first time when she was 14. Not for graduating an elite boarding school, not for being the youngest person to ever get accepted into MIT, not for anything she’s built or created. She’s in the paper because she got drunk after her daddy couldn’t tear himself out of his lab to watch her graduate. Mommy was in another spiritual retreat- rehab- and the only person who came was the butler who loved her and his wife. The papers showed a picture someone had taken and sold. Stark heir with mascara down her eyes and eyeshadow smeared. Her lipstick was long gone and only a line around the edge of her mouth showed she’d been wearing any at all.

  
The headline wondered how her makeup got that way. What or who she could have been doing.

  
In the morning she woke up hungover, puked and slowly washed the make up Anna Jarvis had carefully applied before her ceremony off her face and cried. Once she was done she picked up the brushes and carefully recreated the simple look. But the papers had the story- the Stark girl, wild and crazy, could this be who’s inheriting Stark Industries. What could her father think?

  
Her father didn’t even bother writing and they didn’t allow newspapers in rehab.

  
Give them what they want. Give Howard, Obie, the papers, everyone. Give them what they wanted to see.

  
She gave them everything, the newspapers. She gave them wild parties, cocaine of a hookers ass, threesomes, foursomes, orgies, dating boys, dating girls, dating both at the same time.

  
When she was 15 the papers loved plastering her face in all its foggy, boozed out glory. They always seemed to forget that she also put out invention after invention. That she was 15 and top of her class at MIT. That she was 15 and was changing the world. That she was 15. She learned to put her lip stick on perfectly and how to smile at the camera no matter what she’d taken.

  
By the time she was 18 she stopped letting other people put bombs on her inventions.

  
She started putting the bombs on herself.

  
Obie was a shock.

  
He shouldn’t have been, but he was.

  
Just another person who saw her and decided she could be used. A piece of metal in her chest trying to kill her from inside and a person she saw as her friend trying to kill her outside.

  
She fucked Obie once- 21, angry, breaking, desperate to be more than Howard Starks Daughter. She thought she seduced him. Looking back, she figured out that sex was another tool that could be used to get his fucking claws deeper in her head. Her daddy issues had daddy issues and she knew exactly what she was doing when she fucked her dead fathers’ friend.

  
She just didn’t know what he was doing.

  
Obie pretended to be her moral compass. She created the greatest weapons in the world with the most advanced tech and he stopped any R and D projects that went too far.

  
He shuffled them off to a HYDRA lab and made them for the highest bidder but Toni didn’t find that out for a few years.

  
She fucked Pepper once too. Well twice. Well enough that she lost track. The first time (the second time, the third time, enough times that she started to lose track) was well before Afghanistan and they were all sweaty and high off one of SI’s biggest deals. Toni is a few glasses of champagne and a joint in and so is Pepper. Her heels are kicked off in the corner of the lab, her lipstick is smudged and bleeding into the corners of her mouth, her eye liner no longer perfectly crisp and Toni thinks it’s the first time she’s seen her PA, her friend, look anything less than perfect. Toni has always been selfish, has always wanted to claim things and make them hers so she kisses Pepper and when the woman kisses her back she doesn’t stop.  
In the morning Pepper thighs have bruises on them and Toni has to stamp down the pride and lust that races through her when she sees them.

  
She never fucked Rodney. Maybe in a different life but Toni is reckless and Not A Good Person but she’s also a genius.

  
She kissed Rodney once after he pulled her head out of another toilet. She was too fucked up to care there was vomit on her breath. She just wanted to give the one person who never asked her for anything but her friendship something that everyone wanted from her.

  
He pushed her head away and tucked her into bed. He stayed with her until morning when she didn’t remember her puke stained lips seeking his.

  
She kissed him once sober on her graduation. He kissed her back.

  
Nothing more ever happened. Maybe in another world, one where she was a little less broken it could have happened. But in this world, with these scars, she was smart enough to know not to ruin the one good thing in her life.

  
When Pepper didn’t run screaming after the first few weeks Toni promised herself she wouldn’t ruin the second good thing in her life either. She stopped trying to fuck her assistant (not that she stopped herself in the end) and did her best to be slightly less of an ass, slightly more sober at company meetings and slightly better at having JARVIS remind her of birthdays.

  
She’s also stupid because she keeps fucking Pepper and she knows one day the redhead will wake up to her shit and leave her. They never talk about what they’re doing before Afghanistan. Pepper never blinks as she ushers whoever woke up in Toni’s bed out of it.

  
Pepper doesn’t say no when Toni’s lips seek hers. Always when her heels are off and her make up is no longer perfect. Sometimes Pepper smudges her lip stick before walking into her boss’s lab. She wonders what that makes her. Sometimes their fucking is gentle, in the dark, soft and comforting. Sometimes it’s hard and fast and goddamn it feels just as good. Toni always lets Pepper set the pace and sometimes its Pepper who leaves bite shaped hickeys dotting Toni’s skinny hip bones.

  
Toni won’t blame her when she does leave. Toni will lie to the world if it suits her needs but she won’t lie to herself- she knows exactly who she is. Merchant of Death is not a benediction or a curse but a promise. She might not have started out building bombs but she’s Howard Stark’s daughter and she loves the explosion. Eventually everything in her life will light up with destructive beauty.

  
The first time she has a panic attack she thinks she’s being poisoned.

  
The second time she thinks she deserves this hell.

  
The third time she knows she’ll never really be ok, that there will always be times she’s pulled back into that fucking cave. She still thinks maybe it’s her damnation, her own Inferno to be yanked back to that gods forsaken place. But goddamnit she’ll break the entire world to save what’s hers and Pepper is hers and someone is trying to hurt her.

  
Someone took Pepper and made her afraid. Someone put an explosion inside of Pepper and goddamit Pepper is hers and she’s Peppers and Antonia Maria Fucking Stark will blow up the entire world to save what’s hers.

  
But people can’t be redeemed and her soul is stained way to fucking much for her to even try to ask for redemption anyway. She stands on a podium and tells the whole world that she’s Iron Man because fuck them. They bought her weapons when she was willing to sell them. They used them in all of their destructive glory and suddenly they want to pretend that they weren’t in the game from the beginning. That suddenly just now she’s too dangerous. As if she wasn't dangerous before she built a suit of armor with no boobs to show its her and not some dick in the pilots seat.

  
Toni can deal with a lot of things but she wont deal with hypocrites. She never hid from the titles they gave her.

  
Coulson is a good man in a dirty business and isn’t it ironic that the one who deserves to live is the one who dies?

  
Meeting Ms. America on the fucking helicarrier just the icing on the shit sandwich. Here was Howard Stark’s greatest weapon all shiny and back from the dead and spitting in her face.

  
“Take away your armor and what are you?”

  
Jokes on Ms. America- everyone had been trying to strip her of her armor for years and they hadn’t managed to until that fucking cave. Standing in front of her was everything Howard and told her she could never be. And this bitch agreed.

  
Later, much later, Toni came up with a booze formula that got Stacy drunk and the two of them got shit faced and hashed out their collective issues like adults.

  
Turns out Toni wasn’t the only thing Howard saw as a tool to be used.

  
Turns out Stacy was a bit of a dyke too. That was fun- teaching Ms. America the word bisexual and introducing her to the revolution of queer studies. They got along better after that.

  
Merchant of Death they called her and she didn’t give a flying fuck. She was Howard Starks daughter and she was going to build the biggest boom in the world. Until everyone forgot that Howard Stark once made Ms. America in a machine. Until she was the only thing Howard Stark made. (Ms. America made herself- Stacy made herself but Toni didn’t know that yet.)

  
Until she was trapped in a cave in the middle of the fucking desert with nothing but spare parts keeping her mostly alive. Her weapons tried to kill her and isn’t it fucked up that it took her almost dying to stare in the face of her legacy.

  
Her’s not Howards.

  
Give them what they want, a cruel smile, a drunken debauchery, a good headline, perfect lipstick no matter who or what she’d just had in her mouth.

  
They stripped away every single damn piece of armor she had, booze, lipstick, her beauty because beauty can be a weapon too and told her to make a weapon.

She built a suit, made another explosion, vowed revenge, was rescued and blew up her company.

  
She’s done being Howard’s legacy, his puppet years after his death.

  
But she’s Antonia Maria Fucking Stark and she always survives.

  
She’s just not sure what’s left after the explosion.

  
She’s not sure she cares either. She’s Antonia Maria Fucking Stark, her lipstick is always red, always perfect. She was the Merchant of Death and there’s been blood on her hands since she invented her first drone at 16. She started selling off bits of her soul so long ago that she might not be able to find redemption, but revenge sounds just as fucking good.

  
Every now and again she’d remember the seven-year-old girl who made a robot to be her friend because she was learning that daddy wouldn’t love her until she was a weapon too. Until she was an explosion.

  
Sometimes she remembered being twelve and inventing a way to clean the air.

  
Being sixteen and wanting to deliver vaccines.

  
Howard got his wish- he turned her into the greatest weapon the world has ever seen and there’s no way for her to undo it now.

  
She turned herself into a weapon- a bit of metal sat in her heart and something she built kept it from killing her. She blew up that fucking cave and killed every person who made her afraid there. She still woke up gasping and clawing at her chest to make sure her reactor was still in place.

  
She still woke up thinking the most beautiful thing in the universe was how Pepper exploded under her hands, how her repulsers exploded the people threatening to hurt her and how the Avengers decided that revenge and avenge could mean the same damn thing.


End file.
